Air of sober intimacy notwithstanding, Amour, which won the Palme dâ€™or at this yearâ€™s Cannes Film Festival (Hanekeâ€™s second such honor in only three years), is a horror film. Following the devastating final months experienced by a dying woman and more specifically the loving husband who has taken it upon himself to care for her, it is meant to appall and terrorize, to evoke unpleasant sensations, to leave its audience suspended in dread, and ultimately, as is the primal goal of horror, to elicit catharsis. Hanekeâ€™s methods are clear from the opening: after a long, quiet stretch of simple credits, followed by an extended black screen as silent as the grave, the film smash-cuts into its first scene with a terrifying jolt. An apartment door is thrust open from the outside with a slam loud enough to make the audience members jump from their seats. Emergency medical workers cover their noses in disgust, as clearly the stately place is permeated by something foul. As the camera roves around the flat from room to room, implicitly taking on the perspective of one of the outsiders, we feel a sense of growing fear at what it might reveal as it turns every corner. Finally Haneke offers his first shock, and itâ€™s a doozy: a corpse, shriveled to a brown Mrs. Bates mottle, lying peacefully if horribly on a bed strewn with flowers, its face hollow, its hands desiccated into claws. Quick cut to black, as the title Amour fills the screen like an attack dog let loose.

Hanekeâ€™s former pitiless portraits of bourgeois complacency haunt Amour. Though itâ€™s already been crowned as his most humane film (which forgets the yearning for human connection that runs through Code Unknown), Amour is also intentionally cold to the touch, and that is largely due to its setting. Georges and Annâ€™s spacious apartment contains the hallmarks of the elderly coupleâ€™s life together (books, CDs, a baby grand piano), but if it all feels more art-directed than lived-in itâ€™s because Haneke seems to be peering at them through a telescope. The air of intellectual European refinement around Georges and former piano teacher Ann feels like an unnecessary distancing deviceâ€”and the fact that theyâ€™re given the same generic Haneke names (nearly all his filmsâ€™ couples are named Georges and Ann) should set off some kind of alarm bell. This is not to insinuate that Haneke betrays any insincerity towards his characters, but one wonders how he might have conceived and shot a film about a lowly working-class couple dealing with encroaching death in a tiny one-room apartment. The trappings of upper-middle-class comfortability are simply too present in the mise-en-scĂ¨ne to be ignored.

Breaking through Hanekeâ€™s pointed sculpted perfection, however, are Trintignant and Riva. The critical acclaim that has met and will continue to be showered upon Amour should be owed largely to their remarkable performances; their compassion seems to imbue the entire film. The way they move within Hanekeâ€™s steady, static frames is what give the film its humanity. An early, before-the-fall scene set in the kitchen is remarkably lovely for the way it simply records the way they respond and engage in routine, the familiarity with which they make food, use the sink, and their comfortable body language in each otherâ€™s company. We hardly know these two, yet it is rattling when Annâ€™s face suddenly goes slack at the kitchen table. Unresponsive, momentarily nearly catatonic, Ann seems to disappear from us even as we look at her. We take on Georgesâ€™s perspective; we know weâ€™re watching the first step towards death.

Amour is from this point on devoted to the incremental disintegration of Ann, and the increasing helplessness experienced by Georges as he tries to hang on to her. After a brief ellipsis in which he has taken her to the hospital, Ann returns in a wheelchair, debilitated by a stroke related to an obstruction in the carotid artery, with one arm paralyzed (a particularly cruel fate for a piano teacher, though the sadness of this fact is never spoken of, only reflective in Rivaâ€™s eyes). Situated back in her home, Ann forces a difficult promise out of Georgesâ€”â€śPlease never take me back to the hospitalâ€ťâ€”setting in motion the slouch towards pain and decay that comprises the remainder of the narrative. Though the film is fashioned as an irrevocable descent into negation, Trintignant and Riva make it feel richly alive. Thereâ€™s a resounding impact to the sheer physicality of what weâ€™re seeing, the heaviness of Georgesâ€™s weary body as he helps Ann in and out of her wheelchair, the delicate way that Riva uses one hand to put on her glasses in order to read in bed or flip through a photo album. When Haneke is simply recording frail human movement, Amour is incandescent in its observation. When Annâ€™s body becomes increasingly immobile, the camera gaze grows more insistent, intrusive, less penetrating, not sharing in her grief and pain but staring at it as though a spectacle, especially evident in a scene in which Rivaâ€™s naked, wheelchair-bound body is showered before a static camera. This allows the viewer not to empathize so much as feel as though weâ€™re being shown something important, summoning the suspicion that Haneke is again hectoring us for our edification (he remade his own Funny Games for the U.S. because he said he wanted it to be a â€śslap in the faceâ€ť for American viewers).

The punishing intimacy is for our eyes only, certainly not for Eva, Georges and Annâ€™s daughter, played by Isabelle Huppert. Semi-estranged, evidently due to both physical and emotional distance, Eva is the filmâ€™s single major supporting character, and her sidelining is part of the point. As Ann gets sicker, Georges withdraws from the world, even from Eva, whose phone calls he stops returning and whose few-and-far-between visits are treated with increasing indifference. With the source of Evaâ€™s withered relationship with Georges and Ann left intentionally vague, Huppert is left a bit adrift, but she resourcefully sketches a grown woman unable to untether herself from her mother and father but who perhaps hasnâ€™t realized how frayed that tether has become. Sheâ€™s less insensitive offspring like those in Make Way for Tomorrow or Tokyo Story than a woman unable to fully emotionally comprehend her familyâ€™s situation. Haneke is not unfair to her however; to him this obliviousness is natural. Eva is distraught, but the amour of the filmâ€™s title is definitively not that between child and parent; rather it is an all-consuming, hermetic, specifically romantic love, one that exists and is only understandable in the space between two people whoâ€™ve spent their adult lives together.

Onscreen, this love hits hard, largely by virtue of the generous, naturalistic way Trintignant and Riva inhabit their roles. Theyâ€™re the ones who make this nightmare worth soldiering through, just as itâ€™s the people we adore who make this life worth living, not the omniscient figure who pulls the strings. Hanekeâ€™s grip on his characters is so tight, his aesthetic so determined and claustrophobic, and his art-shock tactics so pronounced that when he occasionally indulges in symbolism it comes across as incongruous. A late-film bit of business featuring Trintignant catching and freeing a pigeon flying loose in the apartment has been criticized for its heavy-handedness, but the problem with this expertly directed scene has more to do with whether such a gesture feels tonally earned after so much horror. Itâ€™s like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre climaxing with a forced spiritual epiphany.